What I really wanted to talk about is an interesting article (with accompanying slide-show) on Slate.com today about the evolution of the Hollywood fight. This is spurred by the fact that some critics called the fights in The Dark Knight rather incomprendable. Personally I didn't find them to be that problematic, but the shaky-cam crazy nature of modern fight scenes has never bothered me too much.

But how about you? Fight scenes are a staple of the action genre. Do you like where they're going? Does the hectic nature of the camera help enforce the dizziness of the fight or does it just make you dizzy?

And for fun, I pose this question to you: What is your favorite fight scene? After much thought I've posted mine below.

Fight scenes in The Dark Knight were better-filmed and edited than in Batman Begins, which were just chaos almost to the point of Bourne Supremacy shaking. I thought the fight scenes in The Dark Knight were much more fluid.

Favorite fight scene: Jean Reno in "Wasabi" in the fight in the game arcade, including the action leading up to it. I also love him disposiing of the villains in the Japanese department store in the same movie. For fights that bring me to tears, it's be Jean Reno, again, in "The Professional" (aka "Leon").

Just saw John Woo's Hardboiled, and the final shootout (they count as fights don't they?) is amazing. Say what you want about how Woo can handle a story or theme, but when fights break out he's unmatched.

Thanks Robert - I wanted to say Raging Bull at first glance (for the same "lazy" reason as Nathaniel - oh yeah, that's Chaplin, not DeNiro, standing there.)

I'm dating myself a bit but we (my sibs, mom and I) saw Die Hard in the theaters when it first came out and I remember both my mom and I were really struck by the fight scenes in it. (No pun intended, I just couldn't come up with a better word.) Granted, we didn't go to see a lot of action films at the time, but we were comparing it to the Hollywood films we were familiar with in which fight scenes were obviously faked by comparison, and very clean (someone "pretends" to throw a punch, someone pretends to have been hit and falls). This film seemed to capture the way fighting can be very brutal and the person throwing the punch is hurt as much as the person receiving it. Although no one mentions it now I think that film did have an effect on films to follow, upping the bar for what would be believable in a fight scene.

I guess you could also say that film sort of wallows in pain (the main character having to walk on glass and so forth), which, weirdly enough, is something female characters have been doing for decades but on an emotional level rather than physical (wallowing in pain, that is.)

If it has to be a punch-up, I'm not sure. There've been many good ones. EASTERN PROMISES was the most recent one to make an impression.

Best gunfights though - there's an expertly crafted assault sequence that comes about halfway through Malick's THIN RED LINE as a handful of soldiers attack a bunker. And of course, the pivotal sequence from HEAT.

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